Friends
by mosylu
Summary: On November first, Hermione gets a surprise at breakfastpossibly the best surprise of her life. A first year fic.


_No wonder no-one can stand her--she's a nightmare, honestly. . . . She must have noticed she's got no friends._

Hermione Granger stared into her trunk, her hand still on her neatly pressed school robes. She'd thought nothing could get the memory of that mountain troll out of her head, but Ron Weasley's words were doing it quite effectively. A little strange, because it had been those words that had sent her into the bathroom in the first place.

What on _earth_, she asked herself for the hundredth time that morning, had prompted them to come after her? 

Hermione sniffed loudly as she started to get dressed. She was grateful, of course, quite grateful--and really, Ron should _thank_ her that she'd taught him Wingardium Leviosa so effectively in class that he'd remembered it in a time of panic--

Oh dear.

She hadn't done her homework.

Hermione stared wide-eyed at the stack of blank, empty parchment, the books she hadn't so much as _looked_ at last night. There wasn't _time_--oh dear oh _dear._ She wasn't looking forward to Professor McGonagall's disapproval, after her mad lie of the night before (what had she been _thinking_? Could take on the troll, indeed!) and her loss of five whole points. She didn't want to lose the professors' approval--it seemed to be all she had right now.

When she'd first come to Hogwarts, she'd been so sure that it would be _different_ here--people would like her for her clever mind, the way her dad had always assured her would happen someday. She'd pictured herself as part of a large, brilliant group of friends, doing things together--eating meals, studying, debating, reading. It had been _such_ a relief when she'd gotten the Hogwarts letter--at last she would be with people like _her_ . . . 

But instead, witches and wizards were just the same as Muggle girls and boys. All Parvati and Lavender cared about was giggling and gossiping and being silly. All Harry and Ron cared about was Quidditch and their silly broomsticks and mucking around. She'd taken to spending all her time in the library, just like grade school.

Hermione sat down on the lid of her trunk with a _thump_. The horrid thing was, she would've almost liked to be friends with those particular two--not Parvati or Lavender, they were just hopeless--but Harry and Ron. 

Harry was Muggle-raised, just like her, even if his mum had been a witch and his dad a wizard. She would love to have someone else around to talk about all the strange new things in the wizarding world. And Ron--she'd seen Ron playing chess with Harry, and she _loved_ to play chess. She was certain she could take him. And he might even have a mind under all that carrot-on-fire hair--some of the things he'd said to her, while they'd been nasty, had been rather nastily clever, too.

She looked at her watch and flew up from the trunk, snatching her bag on her way out the door. If she didn't hurry, she was going to completely miss breakfast, and while she would have skipped it, she'd skipped dinner the night before too, and her stomach felt very hollow and clenchy. She hadn't been able to eat anything substantial after the troll.

She was running too fast to brood on her way down the staircases, but when she got to the Great Hall, she realized it was filled to capacity as all the students had trickled in. She was among the last--no handy open areas of bench for her to settle down on with her books. 

Percy Weasley would make a spot for her, but the thought of sitting by Percy again was unspeakably depressing. It reminded her too much of her teachers, always making room for her at the lunch table--"Move aside, now, Hermione needs to sit,"--because nobody at her grade school wanted to sit by her.

"Oi! Hermione! Where d'you think you're going, then?"

Her head snapped up. It was Ron Weasley, the _git_, with a mouthful of buttered toast. "To eat breakfast, if it's _quite_ all right with you," she said frostily.

He said thickly, through his mouthful--pig--"Over by Perfect Percy?" He turned to Harry, sitting across from him. "I don't understand girls, do you, Harry?"

"For your information, your brother is quite--" boring and stuffy, but she really oughtn't to hold that against him "--intelligent."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Mum tells us all the time. Fine, then, if you prefer his company to ours."

Her mouth dropped a little open, but she shut it again right away. _Their_ company? Was this some horrible joke on Ron's part?

"Did you oversleep?" Harry asked, looking up at her. "We've been saving a spot for you all morning."

"You--?" Harry wasn't nasty enough to joke like that, she'd thought. "Um--yes, a little. The excitement, I expect."

Ron said impatiently, "Are you going to sit, or what?"

She sat, in a daze, and he passed her the plate of toast he'd been feeding off of.

"Eat up, or we'll be late to our first class--wouldn't want that on your reputation, now would you?"

It was the kind of thing he always said to her, sneering and sardonic--_you do it then, if you're so clever--_but something was missing, and it took her a moment to realize that it was the hard edge. He was--

He was _teasing_ her.

"I'm _never_ late to class," she said loftily, taking her first bite of toast. Euphoria gave her the bravery to say, "And if I have anything to say about it, neither shall you be."

"We're in for it now, Harry," Ron said to the other boy. "We'll be prefects before we know it, the three of us."

Harry laughed, and Hermione ducked her head, smiling over her next bite of toast. 

_The three of us._ She liked that.

"Look," Harry was saying to Ron, "I still have troll bogies on my wand! They won't come off--"

"Eurgh!" Ron exclaimed. "Disgusting!" He sounded delighted.

Hermione leaned over. "I've got a Scouring Charm you can use on that . . ."


End file.
